Name: Paste for Meat Pies
Ingredients: ½ pound salt butter or lard or clarified dripping; 1 pound all-purpose flour; cold water; a pinch of salt (if using lard or dripping)

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Paste for Meat Pies

Ingredients

½ pound salt butter or lard or clarified dripping
1 pound all-purpose flour
cold water
a pinch of salt (if using lard or dripping)

Directions

Make the dough

Cut the butter, lard, or dripping into small pieces.
Gradually mix in the flour.
Rub the mixture together with your hands.
Add cold water until a smooth paste forms.

Fold and roll

Roll out the paste flat, then fold it and roll it out again three times.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter, lard or dripping: Fat coats the flour and keeps the pastry tender and layered rather than tough.
All-purpose flour: Forms the main structure of the dough once it is bound with water.

The step that matters

Add cold water until a smooth paste forms. Cold water keeps the fat firm so it stays in pieces that melt during baking, giving flakiness. Adding too much water or working the dough too much develops gluten, which makes the pastry tough.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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Paste for Meat Pies